Hear Us Now: Issue #3

SPOTLIGHT

US IN MELBOURNE

Hello lovely readers!

From all of us here in the Youth Council, welcome to issue three of Hear Us Now! As the weather starts to warm up and we begin preparations for our second Art IRL event taking place in October, we are excited to bring you a fresh batch of insights, interviews and ideas. If you like what you read, be sure to listen out for our podcast (coming soon!) where you can hear us explore more ideas surrounding art, galleries and young people.

In this issue, we hear from Youth Councillors from all over Australia. In Canberra, learn what it’s like to be part of the Gallery’s copyright team as Odette chats with Ellie Misios, Rights and Permissions Officer and hear from Matt and Lawrence as they discuss their experiences as recipients of the 2020 National Summer Art Scholarship. Lawrence also chats to artist Kat Scarlet about her vibrant representations of Tasmanian landscapes while in Sydney, Charlotte writes about protest art used to promote Climate Justice at the 2021 School Strike for Climate rally. Finally, in Victoria, Emma shines a spotlight on Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhales: Every Heart Sings as they visit MPavilion.

Happy reading, and let us know what you think at @nationalgallery.youth on Instagram!

UNEXPECTED INTERVIEW WITH ELLIE MISIOS

YOUTH COUNCIL: What is your role at the gallery? What does the copyright team do?

ELLIE MISIOS: Our team sits within the creative studio in the Marketing, Communications and Visitor Experience portfolio. Our portfolio is responsible for all the outward-facing engagement with the public, and includes Publishing, Exhibition Design, Marketing, Communications and Visitor Services. In Rights & Permissions, we have two halves to our job. Our first main responsibility is where we look after all the ways the Gallery uses reproductions of works of art in communicating to the public. So, it’s pretty much all the ways you engage with the National Gallery – where you see works on social media, on our website, in our publications, as posters and billboards around Australia – any way the works in our collection or exhibitions are used externally. We manage and oversee all the licenses for that.

BY ODETTE MILLER

You’ve likely heard of copyright – it’s an important, overarching set of laws that can make any creative confused. It all has to do with artistic rights, reproduction, ownership. Who controls it, how, and in which circumstances. To help clear all this up, the youth council sat down with the Gallery’s Rights and Permissions Coordinator Ellie Misios to learn about her important department and the role it plays at the National Gallery.

produced by our Imaging team. Rights & Permissions manage the requests via our public Copyright inbox (available to access on our website). These requests come in at any time of the day or night from lots of different time zones and languages. We get to collaborate on plenty of fun projects that people all over the world are working on.

For example: It could be a little old lady in Kent who’s been working on a gardening book for 30 years and she wants to put our Monet on the cover, or it might be a big project where a lender is asking for 30 images. It’s a great insight into lots of interesting projects that feature works from our Collection, but also a good way to keep our fingers on the pulse of what other major institutions or publishing houses are working on at any given time.

Wow, that sounds super dynamic! How would you define what copyright is then?

I think it can get confusing because it’s different in lots of different countries.

That means making sure that we’re always having good conversations with the artists, lenders and owners of the work (if it’s not owned by the National Gallery) so they know what we’re thinking of using the work for and making sure everyone’s happy with how we’re using their works. This moves into the Intellectual Property space – where we ensure there’s no cropping, overprinting, or colour changing without permission from the artist – and also making sure they are credited appropriately. In this way, we’re also responsible for managing the way the Gallery engages with the Economic Rights of the artist – so this means ensuring the artist is paid properly for the way the Gallery has used their work to communicate something to the public.

So that’s one-half of the big job!

The other half is the external version of this – managing and receiving requests from external contacts to use works in our collection. People all over the world get in touch with us to request high resolution files of works in our collection that have been

Copyright in Australia is inherent in any ‘work of the mind’ that has been produced. So, if you’ve made a work of art, if you’ve written a book, if you’ve done a sketch, your copyright already exists in that work. You don’t have to register for it or anything like that. You have the right to protect the way that creation is shared with the public (your ‘Moral Rights’) which means that you can be the person that shares it, or you can control the way that other people share it. And you are also entitled to a royalty payment (your ‘Economic Rights’) when other people use your work.

How did you come into this position? Did you take a traditional law pathway, or do you have an arts background?

I don’t have any law training. My tertiary education is arts-based, and I’m still completing my Masters in Cultural Heritage & Museum Studies. So my approach in this space is artist-focussed, and again – concerned with how their works and stories are depicted. Before moving here to work at the Gallery, I lived in Alice Springs where I was working with the Namatjira

family and supporting the campaign to get their copyright back, because it had been run by a third-party since the early 1980s, and the family had no control (or financial remuneration) over where Albert Namatjira’s works were being reproduced. So, my grassroots foundation in copyright is working with Aboriginal artists to make sure that their voices are heard in this space. On the flip side of this, I also worked to ensure that artists understand what people are wanting to do with their works, how copyright works and what they are entitled to ask for. Whilst it’s all well and good for Australia to have these laws in place, it doesn’t work if it’s not able to be easily understood by the artists who created the work.

The gallery has got such an impressive collection of Indigenous works, and my understanding is that’s always growing. Do you have protocols in place for your Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property (ICIP)?

Yes. Our First Nations Engagement portfolio is responsible for overseeing all permissions required in the ICIP space. In Rights & Permissions, we have a workflow to First Nations staff where any request to use a work from the First Nations collection immediately goes to the First Nations curators to check if the usage is appropriate. As a nonIndigenous person, it’s important to make the distinction that we could never be able to fully understand what the story is in any given First Nations work of art. So, we reserve the right to that decision for the appropriate Curator in the first instance, and then the artist of their representative once our internal approvals have been finalised. Sometimes the curator would be able to say that the story in a particular work is not that relevant for this type of usage, and in most instances are able to suggest a replacement that is more appropriate for the use.

Internally, our Governance department, the First Nations Engagement portfolio and the Rights & Permissions team are the check points for ICIP because we are constantly

viewing usages of works of art with this specific lens. We’ve been doing lots of research and consultations to inform our processes, and it’s always ongoing. Broadly, each of us are working with our colleagues across the country to come up with best practice in the ICIP space, and I think it takes time because it’s really important to make sure that all the cultural institutions are on the same page about this. Working to best practice in this space as standard is always the right approach – then you know that your ethics, morals and values have informed you to make a reliable decision, backed by transparent evidence and support.

The visual and media landscape has shifted significantly over the past decade, not to mention the past few years with the growth of NFTs. Does this present a challenge for the National Gallery?

Yeah, a really good question and I think that it probably comes back to my point about talking about working to best practice as standard. The Copyright Act doesn’t yet have anything in it that tells you how to deal with NFTs or other time-based media, so we aren’t able to write our own policy that interprets the Governments recommendations on this type of work. So as much as we’re trying to feed into the modernization policy (the paperwork to update the Copyright Act), in some cases you just have to rely on your best practice instincts as well – which are always based on the Moral and Economic Rights of the artist.

Luckily, copyright is a really logical space to work in. There’s usually always a trail you can follow. So when you’re working to best practice in this space, if you can identify who made it, who published it and also if the work is still in copyright (obviously with new media it is in copyright) – and then who owns it – once you have a series of answers for these kinds of questions, you can be pretty confident that you’re working with appropriate permissions from a copyright standpoint.

The royalty aspect of visual and mediabased works is probably the area that needs most development in this space. As you can imagine, with so many new types of offerings, it can be tricky to keep up with a scalable Fee Schedule for royalties here – and for third-party users (like the Gallery) to adjust their usages based on this. Organisations like NAVA and the Copyright Agency offer standardised Fee Schedules for specific type of usage, and we always take their advice because they’re the experts in that space and know how to best remunerate artists in their work.

To finish off, do you have any tips for artists and creatives when it comes to copyright?

Okay, tip number one (which I didn’t realise when I first started out in the industry): everything you create is inherently protected by copyright already. It doesn’t need to be published or signed or anything. If you’ve made it, it’s protected. Simple as that.

The second tip is for when you’ve got some work that you’re really proud of and you want to put it online. Certain social media platforms put in their terms and conditions that you agree you’re the rights holder and you have approval to upload this work. What you may not realise is that the terms can also ask you waive your royalty rights (your economic rights) when you upload those work for social media. You’re also agreeing that anyone on social media can share it, especially the person who runs the platform in whatever way that they want. So keep an eye out for that and maybe have a think about if you’re alright with agreeing to that. So basically, you’re waiving all of your copyright rights when you upload it to social media. So I think that’s probably important to know, tip number two is to just be really careful about where you share the files.

My final tip is to make sure that any pictures you have of your work are good quality. This is coming from the perspective that you want to always represent your artwork as best as you can. This might mean checking the lighting

before you take the photo, or the colour once you’ve taken it. Because if you are happy to share your work on social media or to send it out to galleries (or whatever the steps are that you’re taking to promote your work), make sure that you’re respecting yourself enough to present your work in the best light.

It’s important to also make sure that you are credited properly during this process. That means having your name and artwork title in the image’s metadata or sharing the caption in another way. Always try to make sure that if the work is shared, the caption information is right – or you’re at least tagged in the post – this will ensure people can link you to your work, which is what it’s all about in the end!

ARTIST INTERVIEW: KAT SCARLET CONDUCTED AND EDITED

Kat Scarlet is an LGBTIQA+ artist based in the Huon Valley, Southern Tasmania. Kat has worked across many mediums, including textiles, acrylic painting and tattooing. Kat incorporates bright colours and intricate patterns into her pieces and draws inspiration from the beautiful natural landscapes of the Huon Valley. Recently Kat curated the exhibition, Visibility Box, which comprises artworks made by local LGBTIQA+ artists. In a recent interview with Kat, I learned more about Visibility Box along with the exciting journey of Kat’s art practice over the years.

LAWRENCE FENRIZ ELLIS: What are the ideas behind Visibility Box?

KAT SCARLET: I wanted to reach out to LGBTIQA+ artists and feel a sense of community. I felt there would be others out there who would feel the same, and I wanted to give people a space to be visible in a traditionally less-than-tolerant area.

What was your role in delivering the exhibition, and what did it involve?

I was the instigator, curator, organiser – all the bits! I was even the clean-up crew on opening night.

When and where is Visibility Box on display?

The exhibition is split into two parts. Prize winners are displayed in the Art Box (a movable art gallery made from a converted shipping container). The Art Box display was in Huonville from the 5th to the 12th of August before moving to Hobart, where it was on display at the Elizabeth St Pier until the 31st of

August, 2022. The rest of the entrants’ pieces are on display in The Cygnet Community Hub.

What role does art play in the community?

Art plays a very important role in the community. It gives people a place to express themselves, raise questions or awareness, challenge the status quo, work on their mental health and feel seen.

What are you currently working on in your practice?

I am between major works at the moment but still focussing on the natural environment, heading towards micro worlds/fungi/ intertidal zones.

When did you start making art, and what sort of art were you making?

I went to Art College in the UK for two years, where my focus was on textiles.

How long have you lived in Tasmania, and what drew you to the Huon valley?

I have lived in Tasmania for nearly five years. I have lived in the Huon Valley for the entire time I have been here. It is so beautiful, especially in the Valley, and the proximity to such a variety of nature experiences is amazing. My wife is from here originally, and we have been visiting Tasmania since 2011.

How has your art practice changed over the years? Are there any elements that have remained the same?

I never ended up working in textiles. Instead, I studied jewellery making for a year before starting my own jewellery-making business, which I did for 15 years. After that, I undertook a tattoo apprenticeship; this was when I started drawing a lot because of designing tattoos. From there, I worked on illustrationstyle pieces inspired by tattoo design. I have been tattooing for 12 years now. I only started

painting my big acrylic paintings after moving to Tasmania.

What do you think your art practice will look like in the future? Do you have any specific plans?

I would like to do more 3D work and mixed media pieces. I also see some textile pieces in my future. No specific plans, but many, many ideas!

Where can people view your artwork? Do you have a website or social media where people can follow you?

Sure do! Katscarlet.com is my website, and you can see me on Instagram @katscarletart or @katscarlettattoo

Left: Kat Scarlet, Swifty, watercolour, ink, and gouache on cold pressed watercolour paper, 60 x 60cm, 2020, Photograph by Full Gamut, Hobart

Right: Kat Scarlet, Follow the orange path, from Suspended Breath; A Hartz Journey, acrylic on Masonite board, 90 x 122cm, 2021. Photograph by Full Gamut, Hobart

HEAR US

This issue’s ‘Hear Us In’ is going to be a little different. This is a call out to all year 11 students who are interested in a career in the arts and may want to participate in an incredible, artist-led, creative development week in Canberra. The 2023 National Gallery Summer Art Scholarship is now open for applications! As alumni of the program, we would like to share our experience and how it led to us to now being on the Youth Council.

THE NATIONAL SUMMER ART SCHOLARSHIP

MATT: Lawrence from Tasmania and I, Matt from Queensland, are both National Summer Art Scholarship alumni. We were both selected for the scholarship back in 2020 and we are both currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT. We want to encourage everyone reading this article to apply for the scholarship by sharing with you our experience of our time in Canberra and how participating in the scholarship can propel you into the creative industries.

LAWRENCE: I discovered my passion for art in year 11 (2019) when I experimented by studying an art subject at Hobart College in Tasmania. In August of that year, my art teacher approached me with a brochure for the National Summer Art Scholarship Program. I was reluctant to apply as I had only recently begun making art; however, the program sounded incredible, and I decided to apply regardless of my reluctance. It was a thrilling surprise to receive the news that I had been selected for the scholarship. If you are in year 11 and are passionate about art, whether you have been making art for years, months, weeks, or days, I highly encourage you to apply. My experience in Canberra was magnificent. I learnt about many brilliant topics alongside friendly and accommodating people. Throughout the program, I gained self-confidence, acquired knowledge, and discovered video art which I am now majoring in at university.

MATT: So, what is the summer scholarship all about? It’s a week-long experience for a group of sixteen year 11 students – two people from each state and territory. The entire week is all expenses paid and jam packed with behind-the-scenes experiences in and around the National Gallery, artists and the national art collection.

During the week we were given a full access backstage pass at the National Gallery, getting to experience what goes into running one of the largest gallery spaces in Australia. We had the opportunity to meet some incredible people and look and learn about their work including restorers, art historians, curators, the Director and spent a lot of our time working with practising artists. We had talks with some inspiring artists about their practice, participated in developmental workshops and created collaborative works.

LAWRENCE: The scholarship program had a significant impact on me. Upon my return to Hobart, I felt that I wanted to help make art and art events more accessible to other young people. Thus, I applied for the National Gallery Youth Council in 2022. Being part of the Youth Council has broadened my perspectives, offered me new experiences and opportunities, and has allowed me to work with some truly incredible people.

MATT: For me what made the Summer Scholarship so unforgettable was the people. I feel so good to be around like-minded people that are all passionate about creativity. Usually, I am quite shy and quiet around new people, but amongst this group of 15 others from across the country, I truly felt I could be myself with no judgement. Engagement in this program gave me the confidence to move from Queensland to Victoria and study at the top art school in Australia and it has also opened opportunities, outside of formal study, that have fast-tracked my creative journey. One of these opportunities has been to be a member of the National Gallery’s Youth Council. This council has given me the chance to collaborate with like-minded people to create some inspiring programs and events. Without the confidence I gained in my creative practice through the summer scholarship I don’t think I would have been a part of such a brilliant collection of people who advocate for all young creatives across Australia.

We really encourage you to go for it and apply for the summer scholarship! It is unique to any other youth development program in that it is tailored to young people who are inspired and passionate to develop an artistic career. Both programs have helped give us confidence to realise our full potential and to drive us to seek a career in creative industries, and we promise you – you will have just as an amazing time as we did!

‘I truly felt I could be myself with no judgement’

AND IDEAS

ARTISTIC ACTIVISM YOUTH LEAD MOVEMENTS AND PROTEST ART

The number of young activists across the world is rising as the number of social issues has become more dire. Collective work amongst youth activists has been described as the most remarkable and important mass movement of our age. From local to global initiatives, youth are coming together to demonstrate action against societal issues and to share visions of a fairer, safer and cleaner world. One of many social issues at the front of my mind is Global Warming/Climate change. Over the past couple of years, you would’ve seen news coverage of Youth lead Climate Strikes happening across Australia after devastating natural disasters have swept through Australia.

On 6 May, I attended the pre-federal election Climate Strike organised by Schools Strikes for Climate (SS4C) in Town Hall on Warrang Land. I have been privileged to attend multiple SS4C protests over the years but upon reflection, this strike was by far the most memorable. On that Friday, I stood amongst thousands of young people across Australia protesting the lack of climate action made by the federal government. The strike was organised after the release of a new analysis from Climate Analytics Australia which showed the climate policies of the major political parties, which are consistent with dangerous levels of warming. Pre-election, the Morrison Liberal Government was spending $20,000 towards the Fossil Fuel industry per minute. The protest called for people over the age of 18 to vote for our climate and futures in the election. Australia is experiencing higher temperatures, more extreme droughts, fire seasons, floods and more extreme weather due to climate change. The climate crisis will continue to impact

everyone. Seeing the posters and banners and merchandise at the strike reminded me of the history behind Protest/Propaganda Art and the impact it has on democracy.

The Protest Art I saw during the pre-election strike was better than ever and conveyed just as much as the speakers and organisers of the event.

Whilst the majority of people have learned about Propaganda Art used in WWII at school, Protest Art has been used to represent causes/movements and communities since. Protest Art aims to respond to and inform others about social movements through visual representation. Protest Art asks audiences to imagine a vision of positive change and persuades people to take action. Propaganda Art can physically take form through Craftism, Street Art, Guerilla Art, Public Performance, Projection Art, Political Art, Culture Jamming, Photography, Poetry or Music.

Previous and Left: SS4C Instagram/Photos by Parker Floris @parkerflorisphoto

Tate Modern/Image by the Guerrilla Girls

Propaganda Art often uses repurposed existing materials and messages, quotes, pop culture references, and photographs of figures and monuments in ways that point to their hypocrisy.

One of the common impacts of Protest Art is to push against the norms and rules of society. When I think of Protest Art I am reminded of how world-renowned artists like Paula Rego, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, Banksy, Jacob Lawrence, the Guerilla Girls and Keith Haring have mastered using art as a dissent. The visual styles of artists can be associated with certain societal movements.

At the May 6 strike, SS4C held an official merch stand, selling tote bags and posters designed by artist Jess Harwood. Jess Harwood is a climate and political cartoonist whose work has been featured by the BBC, ABC and The Guardian. The artist uses digital illustration to comment on political issues within Australia’s federal government. Through Jess’ online platform, it is evident that through new technologies the voices of activists and Protest Art in digital spaces will continue to be shared.

Last year, 18-year-old artist Rosie Pettenon created a panorama painting that collaged stand-out images from the 2021 September global Climate strikes. She says the painting is a representation of the Youth rising to demand action on climate change. The artwork was commissioned by SS4C for those who couldn’t strike IRL. This painting has left a mark on me and I make sure to mention it whenever Climate Justice comes up in conversation.

Protest Art is a complex and ever-expanding art form that has been continually used throughout history. With the increase, frequency and urgent intensity of social challenges, Protest Art will continue to make an impact on social movements. Show up for the societal issues you believe in and demand change. HEAR US NOW!

Whilst it is extremely important to support these movements on a macro level, it’s important to do what you can individually –in the mind of the climate, altering your lifestyle, step by step for a more simplistic and sustainable one. Most recently I have swapped out tube toothpaste for tooth powder!

‘Propaganda Art often uses repurposed existing materials and messages, quotes, pop culture references, and photographs of figures and monuments in ways that point to their hypocrisy’

SPOTLIGHT: SKYWHALES AT MPAVILION(VICTORIA)